Ferragamo: How to Ski Italian Style with Alberto Tomba

Challenge

Few briefs carry the weight of a century. Ferragamo – a house built on the belief that craft holds value – wanted to make their brand feel alive and culturally relevant without the scale of a major above-the-line campaign. The budget was fixed at €237k. The expectation was not.

The challenge was threefold. The campaign needed to feel authentically Ferragamo: premium, timeless, worthy of a luxury house with a century of heritage. It needed to connect with a discerning audience: CNBC’s intelligent, affluent, globally minded readers: people who expect premium content from CNBC and would notice immediately if the branded content didn’t match the quality of our environment. And it needed to deliver measurable performance across the full funnel, from brand awareness through to conversion.

The Winter Olympics were coming to Italy, a cultural moment tailor-made for Ferragamo. But official rights were unavailable, and at €237k, conventional sponsorship was never an option. The brief demanded creative proximity to the moment, not financial proximity.

Brand:

Entered by:

With Ambassador Alberto Tomba, Italian legend and Olympic champion confirmed, and a campaign built around Italian alpine life, there was no shortcut on production. Shooting Ferragamo’s winter collection on location, in the snow, in the mountains, with a crew, was the only way to make it feel real. That demanded clever producing, efficient scoping and creative direction precise enough to get everything in one day. One recce, one shoot day, zero waste.

Content Solution

The answer to the budget challenge wasn’t to do less. It was to structure the entire creative around maximum output from a single, focused production. Every dollar of the €237k went to media. CNBC Brand Studio delivered the full production – hero film, three episode films, traffic drivers, social cut-downs and a dedicated editorial article on CNBC.com – as part of the media partnership. Ferragamo received a premium branded content campaign and a full creative suite at the cost of the media buy alone.

That required the creative idea to work hard from the outset. “How to Ski Italian Style” is a love letter to Italy, and we shot it like one. With Tomba as our protagonist, we built a world where style isn’t worn, it’s lived. And nobody lives it quite like Ferragamo. Structured around three editorial chapters – “The Style”, “The Mountain”, “The Table” – the campaign had genuine editorial architecture, with Ferragamo’s products, the red leather glove, the Tramezza shoe among them, spotlighted through considered camera work, woven into scenes as naturally as they belong in Italian life.

The decision to shoot on 16mm was both creative and strategic. For the luxury and lifestyle category, format is never incidental. The grain, warmth and texture of 16mm gave the work a timeless quality that digital cannot replicate, and that no amount of post-production spend could manufacture. It was the right creative call, and it was efficient: one aesthetic decision that elevated the entire production.

Production was scoped with precision. One recce. One shoot day in Madonna di Campiglio: a resort three hours from Milan airport, deep in the Dolomites, shot the week before Christmas. The night before, a full whiteout. On the day, the sun broke through as filming progressed. Tomba, available only from 11am with winter light gone by 4pm, gave the team five hours. Working through a translator, his language shaped the creative: the near-silent film, led by music and image, was born partly from that constraint. The result feels effortless. It was not, but it was efficient.

Every asset had a defined role from brief to delivery: the hero film for depth, the episodes for serialised engagement, the cut-downs for social reach, the traffic drivers for lower-funnel response.

Media/Content Amplification Solution

The €237k was invested entirely in media, and it was that media partnership with CNBC that unlocked the full branded content production at no additional cost. The amplification strategy was then built to extract maximum value from every element of that investment: premium editorial context, high-impact display, video and paid social working together across the full funnel, each format with a defined role and a measurable contribution.

CNBC.com served as the campaign’s premium home: a trusted, brand-safe editorial environment that gave Ferragamo immediate credibility with an affluent, globally minded audience. This context mattered: appearing alongside CNBC’s own editorial elevated the branded content by association, placing Ferragamo in a premium environment that reflected the quality of the work.

High-impact display formats – branded content cards, hero placements, interscrollers and carousel formats – drove audiences from across CNBC’s digital ecosystem into the content experience, with branded content cards the standout performer at 0.42% CTR against a 0.34–0.38% benchmark.

Across both CNBC.com and social, AI-driven optimisation ensured every pound of media investment was directed towards the highest-performing assets in real time. On-site, AI-optimised ad units adapted creative and copy continuously across mobile and desktop. On social, AI-powered amplification monitored performance across platforms and dynamically shifted budget towards the strongest creative — so the best work received the most investment throughout the campaign’s run. For a fixed budget, this was critical: it meant the €237k was never wasted on underperforming formats.

Video was the engine of the plan. CNBC pre-roll placed the hero film in a premium environment and achieved a 91.76% video-through rate against a 70% benchmark, proof that the creative held attention as well as reaching it. Shorter cut-downs extended the campaign into social and mobile-first environments on Meta and TikTok, with CNBC first-party data used to build lookalike audiences that closely mirrored Ferragamo’s target profile, maximising relevance without requiring additional spend.

The result was a media plan that generated full-funnel impact from a single focused investment, driving discovery through premium display, sustaining attention through video, and converting engagement into measurable lower-funnel response across six markets.

Small Budget, Great Impact | Winner🏅

"An elegantly efficient content activation. The judges praised the choice to film on 16mm as simultaneously the right aesthetic call and an efficient one. Three editorial chapters gave the campaign genuine narrative architecture, with products woven naturally into the scenes rather than simply placed within them. Content created under considerable constraints became opportunities, ultimately leveraged as print advertising for a luxury house with a century of heritage, which was the ultimate stamp of approval for the judges."

– Judges comments.

Impressions and 27,000 clicks from a €237k media investment.

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Campaign CTR, against a benchmark of 0.34% to 0.38%.

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Exceptionally high video through-rate, proof that the creative held attention.

Results

Strong creative makes for strong results, and this campaign proved it across every measure.

A €237k media investment delivered over 7.9 million impressions and 27,000 clicks, with a combined CTR of 0.48% across digital display and pre-roll, consistently outperforming benchmarks across every key format. Rich media units achieved 0.42% CTR, above the 0.34–0.38% benchmark. Social display reached 0.59% CTR, significantly ahead of benchmark. CNBC pre-roll achieved a 91.76% video-through rate against a 70% benchmark – audiences reached the content and stayed for it.

Social video extended that impact further: 5.2 million impressions, 3.2 million video views and 2.6 million completions at a 79.78% average completion rate. On Meta, the campaign achieved a 99.33% VTR and 97.33% completion rate. YouTube delivered 54.73%, more than double the 23.06% benchmark. The strongest 30-second cut alone generated 1.7 million views. Lower-funnel performance reached up to 4.2x ROAS and 12,400 conversions across platforms.

But the most significant result sits beyond the numbers. Ferragamo was a brand new client for CNBC Brand Studio – a first relationship with one of the world’s great luxury houses. At the campaign’s end, Ferragamo took the assets and ran them as an out-of-home campaign in Milan. No additional production. Content created within a €237k media buy became an above-the-line brand campaign, generating significant additional ROI at zero extra cost.

For a house with Ferragamo’s history and standards, repurposing content is not a small decision. It is the definitive proof that a focused, intelligently structured media investment can deliver creative work of the highest order, and results that far exceed the size of the budget.